Vinayak Hegde

Recently I went over to the Strand Book stall’s 60th Anniversary sale which is on till Dec 28th. There was a decent collection of books (though not more than the typical 20% discount). Among the books I bought was ‘The book of Indian Birds’ by Salim Ali. This book brought back fond memories of my childhood. My parents were members of BNHS (Bombay Natural History Society) and regularly took me out to talks and slideshows (Salim Ali was associated with BNHS for a longtime). It is a nice guidebook with lots of interesting information though by no means exhaustive.It contains informative entries on more than 500 birds found on the Indian Subcontinent. I used it to identify the Small Bee-eater in Udaipur and the River Tern near Bhadra Dam in Chikamagalur.

I took this picture at the Maharana Pratap Memorial (Moti Magri) overlooking the Fateh Sagar Lake in Udaipur. The Small Bee-eater (Merops Orientalis) is distinguished by Reddish Brown head and neck and it’s tails fears which prolong into blunt pins. You can see the Bee-eater actually has a bee in it’s beak. It found all throughout the Indian Subcontinent.

The River Tern (Sterna Albifrons) can be distinguished by it’s yellow beak and black cape and is a noisy and a gregarious bird. It is found all round the Indian Subcontinent (except Sri Lanka) and usually seen near river banks and lakes. This picture was taken near the Bhadra Dam (We stayed in the nice Jungle Lodges log huts nearby).

The pictures have been crossposted to my Photoblog

Talk on SaaS and Cloud Computing by Vikram Murudeshwar, Akamai Technologies India.

Startup Saturday Bangalore, December was held at a Honeywell India which is just down the road from IIM Bangalore. Vikram Murudeshwar, my colleague from Akamai was the first speaker. His talk was on “Saas and Cloud Computing”. He dispelled some of the myths behind SaaS. SaaS has greatly levelled the playing field for startups. If you have product that is useful, your go-to-market time and time for rolling out incremental updates comes down phenomenally. Also as a provider, you have greater control over the environment in which your software is deployed. The picture is not completely rosy however as SaaS providers have to work harder to secure their customers data and ensure compliance. Cloud computing takes the concept of SaaS to the next level from just software to hardware and infrastructure for building and deploying software using virtualization and using intelligent network optimizations. Attendees had several technical questions regarding scaling a website from a single server to a distributed datacenter model. At this point, I jumped in to provide some answers based on my experience. It was a good interactive session with a mix of technical and business questions which continued into the snacks break.

The Presentation is below:

Collaboration between Honeywell and startups by Harsha Angeri, Honeywell India

After the snacks break, Harsha Angeri from Honeywell India spoke about the challenges bigger companies face to innovate and explore new areas of growth. The Honeywell program which will be announced shortly alongwith Headstart, will enable startups and Honeywell to collaborate with each other. The benefits to Honeywell are manifold with this collaboration – they get the domain expertise of the startups, they get to explore new areas without much risk and they get reach to the end-consumer in case of B2C startups as Honeywell deals mostly with B2B customers. The benefits to startups are also manifold – Startups gets access to the customer and realworld feedback, they also get Honeywell’s feedback in areas which Honeywell is strong and they also get the market reach and legitimacy by dealing with a larger company such as Honeywell. It’s a win-win situation for all those involved in this collaboration.

Lifemojo Demo by Namit Nangia

The last talk was by Namit Nangia – the CEO of Lifemojo. He dwelled on the importance of nutrition and how lifemojo pro (their product) which is delivered via a website can help their users lead a more healthy lifestyle. Lifemojo can help you come up with a personalized nutritional diet and users can also get in touch with nutrition experts using their web portal. The access to the website can also be provide busing mobiles so that people have access to their custom healthplans on the move. Lifemojo is a good product in the personal and preventive healthcare market niche – a nascent segment but a rapidly growing one. During the snacks break, Lifemojo had setup a laptop so people who were curious about Lifemojo product could testdrive and know more about it.

Click here for Startup Saturday November 2008 Edition.

Lake Wanaka is the 4th largest lake in New Zealand and located on the South Island. It was formed by a u-shaped valley of a glacier which melted in the last ice age. The Southern Alps are on it’s western shores and the Wanaka town lies at it’s southern tip. It is very close to the Queenstown – the adventure spots hotspot and the birthplace of modern bungee jumping.

More technical details about the photo at my photoblog (click on Image Info).

Day 1

Atul talked about how the focus of the event had changed over the year to focus more and more on developers and actual contributions. There were several workouts planned and people were hacking code in the rooms provided to them. There were lesser people on the first day compared to the earlier conferences (probably because of less publicity and less focus on talks) and it was great to see a lot more students at foss.in this time.

Harald talked about how fragmented the embedded linux market is and how embedded linux vendors disregard free software principles and do not reap the benefits of working with community. This leads to hardware that has lots of unpatched vulnerabilities and kernels that do not take advantages of the latest developments. Next talk I that I attended was Khasim’s Talk on Beagleboard. Khasim started his talk explaining how our culture and upbringing places barriers on team work and sharing. Beagleboard is a low-cost, low power, OMAP3-based board which can be used to build movie players (it has han an onboard DSP which can be used for decoding HD-quality video), portable wifi / GPS devices (via additional USB connects) or even power a laptop.

Day 2

On day two I attended most of the Maemo talks. Maemo is the mostly open source platform that powers Nokia Internet tablets such as Nokia N810. Yannick Pallet talked about the software that comprises maemo and The community development process to acquaint developers who want to contribute to maemo. Nokia as a company understands opensource and the community surrounding it, as I heard Yannick ask contributors to contribute their patches upstream several times. Doing so would automatically improve maemo as it uses components directly from the various component releases.

Telepathy is a framework which provides an abstraction layer for several realtime communications including support for audio and video. Telepathy uses discrete components which communicate with each other via messages and programs and libraries licensed under different licenses can be interact without any hindrances. The demo of the video chat built using Telepathy was cool. audio and video support on Linux has come a long way (in terms on interoperability, format support and ease of configuration) from the early days. I spent rest of the day speaking to various people on a variety of issues (or “corridor talks”). These are the best part of any conference and foss.in is no exception.

Day 3

I was not feeling well, so I came in late and just attended Philip’s talk on YUI and the Lustre filesystem talk later in the evening. I would have liked both talks to have more discussion about code and design philosophies (Philip did talk a little bit about design and had some code). The Lustre talk was disappointing as most of the content could be found out by reading documentation so it got boring pretty quickly.

Day 4
Could not attend I was down with fever and cold. I was looking forward to the kernel workouts and had prepared by downloading the kernel but unfortunately could not make it that day.

Day 5

I was looking at the UFraw code and seeing if I could add capability for EXIF information manipulation using exiv2 libraries during the first part of the day. I attended Anant’s talks on Mozilla lab projects. He talked about Mozilla Weave, Prism and Personas. It was nice to hear that Prism was graduating and will be incorporated into Firefox. Prism enables the development of site-specific browsers. It would be intersting if some of the Google gears capabilties could be added to Prism then it might be possible to run some web applications offline just like desktops apps. Foss.in 2008 ended with Kalyan’s keynote on sharing and caring. He talked on a variety of subjects such as security, photography and the role of communities. I enjoyed the photographs as well as the example for breaking the security of webapps using the rediff shopping example. Overall the conference was good with it’s focus on contributions (I think they have succeeded).

However there is some scope for improvements:

1. It was surprising that the organisers ran of out of delegate kits quite frequently and they were given out sporadically and on an adhoc basis. This could have been managed better.
2. The quality of talks could have definitely been better overall so could have the event publicity. I think it was partially due to the difficult economic climate and lesser sponsorship.
3. Less publicity could also have been the cause that there were not many projects exhibiting at the FOSS Expo this time.
4. Atul should be more diplomatic (WONTFIX) . Running a good conference for several years (that too with unpaid volunteers) is a tough task so that should be an answer to detractors in itself.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for organizing a good conference.